'Seas are kind of high for that, Captain.'
'But not that high. Not if we're both bow-on into the sea. And it'll save time over trying to rig a boatswain's chair, or lower people down one at a time from the helicopter.'
'Yes, sir.'
Cruise ships like the Atlantis Queen numbered their passenger decks First, Second, Third, and so on, going from bottom to top, with the First Deck generally being the level at which passengers entered from the dock. The crew decks, however, were given alphabetical identifiers, starting immediately under the First Deck with A Deck and going down to B, C, and D Decks below. On the Queen, A Deck was the lowest deck with portholes — though these were permanently closed — and the level for the cargo hold entry doors, while B Deck was just above the waterline. That meant that the Pacific Sandpiper's forward deck would be at roughly the same level, the same distance above the water, as the Queen's A Deck.
'Captain?' Jablonsky called. 'They say to come on in, port to starboard.'
'Let's do it,' Phillips said. 'Helm, bring us two points to starboard.'
And the Atlantic Queen began closing with the smaller freighter.
Fuchida leaned back from the console, removing the headset. Abdel Ramid was standing behind him. 'What did they say?' he asked in Arabic.
'They will come alongside,' Fuchida replied in the same language, 'their left side to our right. They will rig a kind of bridge to cross from our deck to their cargo hold.'
Ramid grinned. 'They're making it easy for us.'
'It's happening as we planned it,' Fuchida said, shrugging. 'They have to respond to an emergency at sea, and they have much better emergency medical services on board… to take care of all of those rich, pampered tourists. Do you have everyone, all of the prisoners, off the deck and out of sight?'
Ramid nodded. 'The prisoners from outside all have been moved to the crew's recreation area, their hands and feet have been tied, and they are under heavy guard. The ship's crew has also retrieved the small boat, with two more of your people on board.'
'Inui and Yano,' Fuchida said. 'Are they okay?'
'Half-drowned and suffering from immersion in cold water, but they seem to be recovering,' Ramid said. 'They were well enough to hold the two crewmen in the boat at gunpoint until we could bring them aboard.'
Fuchida could only imagine the thoughts of the Ishikari crewmen still out there in the water, clinging to rafts and wreckage as they watched the Sandpiper take her small boat back on board and begin to move off toward the horizon. The ship was almost a mile, now, from where the Ishikari had gone down.
'And the crewmen on board this ship?' Fuchida asked.
Ramid jerked his head, indicating the bridge behind him. 'The bridge personnel are cooperating. They don't like it — I think the captain is trying to kill us with the evil eye — but they are cooperating.'
'He can glare all he wants. So long as he does what we tell him.'
'We have men now in the engineering section, watching the crew there, holding them at gunpoint. And after the captain made his announcement over the intercom, several more crewmen have come out of hiding… including the security people in the aft gun position.'
'Excellent.'
They'd had to ignore the aft gun, number 3, in the initial attack. Moritomi had taken out number 2, and the men on board the helicopter had killed the gunners at number 1 from the air. That had been a close thing; any one of the rapid-fire cannons mounted on the Sandpiper could have swatted the helicopter from the sky as easily as a mosquito. The assault force had been gambling on the fact that the civilian crew of the plutonium ship would be confused, that even the former military men within the onboard security force would have been unsure of what was happening and hold their fire for that reason. Their delay had made it possible for Ramid's helicopter to get close to the number 1 gun before the ship's defenders had fully realized that the ship was under attack and kill them from the air with machine-gun fire.
'Perform a careful check,' Fuchida went on. 'There were a total of thirty security guards. We want to be especially certain that they are all accounted for.'
'You do not need to tell me my business, Fuchida,' Ramid said, his voice crisp. 'You are not in command here.'
Fuchida started to reply, then thought better of it, turning away. 'As you say.'
Technically, Ramid was in command of the Pacific Sandpiper assault group. Lines of command had been only lightly and informally sketched in, however, as the operation planning had come together. The Islamist Jihad International — an operational arm of al-Qaeda — and the Kokusaiteki Kakumei Domei had been forced to work together, but despite the pretensions of international revolution, neither organization was fully comfortable with the other. The KKD had needed al-Qaeda for the resources to hit a target as large and as formidable as the Pacific Sandpiper, the Islamists had needed the KKD in order to infiltrate the crew of the Ishikari, destroy the military escort, and create the diversion necessary for the taking of the plutonium ship.
The goals of the two groups, however, remained quite different from each other, and neither fully trusted the other, even yet.
'Then I respectfully suggest, sir,' Fuchida said, his voice biting as he replaced the headset over his ears, 'that you put the helicopter back in the air. Our next target will be alongside within a few minutes.'
Ramid said nothing, but he turned away to comply.
With the Arab's sour attitude, however, Fuchida knew there would be trouble.
'The helicopter's taking off,' Vandergrift noted. 'Why are they so far from the fire, though?'
'Probably don't want to risk the ship,' Captain Phillips said. He gave a grim chuckle. 'With their cargo, I can't say I blame them!'
'Yeah. I'm still not sure it's a good idea going close aboard, sir.'
'Your reservations are noted, Number One. Give me an alternative and I'll consider it.'
'We hold back, lower boats to assist with the rescue operations, and wait for the Campbeltown, the Ark Royal, or La Motte-Picquet to arrive.'
The Campbeltown, the frigate that had escorted the Pacific Sandpiper clear of British waters the day before, was reportedly now on her way here from the vicinity of the Gornish coast. The Ark Royal was one of Britain's aircraft carriers, with a Sea Harrier squadron embarked on board, an escort of several smaller warships, and a shipboard medical facility as good as or better than the Queen's. She was coming out of the Channel from Portsmouth. And La Motte-Picquet was a French guided missile destroyer out of Brest. All three vessels were on their way at flank, but none would be on the scene in less than an hour and a half to two hours.
'Ninety minutes before any of them arrive,' Phillips said. 'The sooner we get the injured to medical care, the better their chances. Especially burn victims.'
'I know, sir.'
'And I know what you're feeling. But it's safe enough. The radioactive material is stored inside special ninety-eight-ton flasks. Each flask has shock absorbers, massively thick walls, and it has built-in neutron shielding, gamma shielding, and heat conductors to keep the contents cool. One flask holds up to twenty-eight separate containers of plutonium, but the total in one flask is only about two hundred kilos. It's stored in separate packages, though, to prevent the possibility of the whole thing going to critical mass and exploding.'
'How reassuring.'
There was a sharply sarcastic edge to Vandergrift's voice, but Phillips ignored it. 'They do extensive radiation monitoring on those ships,' he continued. 'The actual radiation exposure for the crew… I forget the specifics, but it's less than ordinary people onshore get just from background radiation.'
'Less than you get ashore? What does that mean?'
'Ordinary rock has uranium in it. It gives off background radiation, just a tiny, tiny bit. We don't even have that when we're at sea.' He waved his arm, taking in the blue-gray ocean. 'No rocks. And what we'll get from those flasks on board the Sandpiper is less than what we get when we're ashore. So don't worry about it. We're not about to start glowing if we come alongside that vessel!'
'I was just concerned about our passengers and crew, sir.'
